There have been recently in German media quite some debates on Internetsecurity for the common people and serious concerns were also expressedby the German president. A German minister even recommended thecitizens to take care of the security of their communications"themselves", without however telling them "how" -- similar IMHO torecommending citizens to take care of not being robbed "themselves".(It may incidentally be noted that in Germany, in distinction to USA,a permission is required to buy guns and that permission is not easyto get). Now are there any good ideas of how the common people coulddefend themselves against Prism, Tempora, etc., noting that some mightyEastern countries may have comparable, though yet unrevealed, projectsrunning as well? Each individual idea may not be good enough, butperhaps through appropriate combinations there could result insomething not too bad?

As a start I venture to sketch a humble idea of my own in thefollowing:

If it could be managed to have sufficiently large volumes of encryptedemails constantly on the Internet, the surveillance mechanisms wouldvery likely at least loose much of their efficiencies, if not beentirely bogged down due to overloading. To achieve that, it wouldthus principally depend on whether there are sufficient number ofcommon people who would voluntarily take the trouble to do encryptions(or at least do some additional keystrokes, see (3) below) and so IMHOthis is the biggest problem to be faced by the present idea.

We assume that each email has a plaintext part and an attached filewith encrypted stuff. It may be noted that for such senders (let's callthem activists):

(1) They certainly may not have all the time materials that necessarilyneed to be kept secrect, in which case for convenience the attachmentcan be a dummy file, in particular an arbitrarily chosen one from anumber of dummies stored on stock. Whether the file contains genuinestuff could e.g. be indicated by a chosen keyword in the plaintext partof the email.

(2) Not all their friends would like to do any encryption work tocommunicate with them, in which case these friends need only toleratethe activists' sending them emails with dummies.

(3) Those activists who live on the maxim of having absolutely nothingto hide could always send dummies as attachment.

Note also that the idea of having only one part of the whole messagethat is encrypted could also be applied e.g. to the webpages, which maycontain a dynamically varying encrypted part for the partners toreceive.

Key management could be a big stumbling block for the idea in practice.Since I have anyway a bias favouring symmetric encryptions (I mistrustPKI whose software/hardware security I am unable to verify for povertyof knowledge and other practical reasons -- the proprietary software orhardware involved could contain backdoors implanted by the secretagencies and the trustworthieness of the certificate agencies, i.e.the human factors, are questionable, concrete symmetric algorithms arein general easier to understand than concrete asymmetric algorithmsIMHO), I envisage that each pair of partners would somehow agree andkeep a master key for their communications, from which session keyscould be generated via encrypting certain data that partly involvetime, message number etc. At least for a certain part of the activistswho live in democratic countries secure transfer and keeping of thesemaster keys among them shouldn't be a too big problem IMHO.

Note that we capitalize on encryption, i.e. the difficulties (effortsand resources required) of the agencies to find the (potentially, butnot certainly, vital for them) secret informations and do not (andcannot) hinder their collection of the meta data. Hence the portion ofemails from the activists need not be significant in relation to thetotal volume of emails on the Internet.

A tiny remark is that in countries where the law enforcement coulddemand surrendering of the encryption keys, the dummies couldn't beentirely arbitrarily random, since otherwise it would be impossible tosatisfy the demands of the authority.

A somewhat different, seemingly also viable, idea is the following:The activists could send genuine (i.e. for communication) or dummy(i.e. to enhance the load of cryptanalysis) messages to Usenet groupslike alt.anonymous.messages. I am ignorant whether that group hascurrently more than a few congeners, if at all. Anyway, if there isa "run" for such services, evidently many more of its genre would beneeded, which IMHO shouldn't nevertheless be an unsolvable problem.BTW, some activists could run something analogous to certain Internetforums with browser as interface for posting, excepting that there willbe encrypted stuffs posted, with membership available to the generalpublic or limited in some specific way. (Note that on some computersaccess to Usenet groups may not have been installed, but access toa forum needs only a browser which is always available. In lessdemocratic geographic locations one could send messages from a callshop or internet cafe (utilising the facility available there to accessthe Internet, thus not involving one's own IP address, nor emailaddress), taking due care of possible observations by agents there.)

My personal view of the current surveillance is fairly analogous toone of, say, an intimidating disease of pandemic nature. In such casesone knows that one doesn't have "really" effective means to solve theproblem, but one must/should nonetheless join efforts/thoughts toreduce, as far as possible. the "impact" of the evils. As I indicated,there appears unlikely to be a way to stop collection of meta data.What seems to be viable is IMHO a reduction of the practical efficiencyof the huge computing resources of the agencies. And that I think isquite possible in practice by presenting to their machines anadditional very huge load of cryptanalysis. In fact, imagine that therewere 100 Internet forums each with daily an average of 100 encryptedposts, such that with a probability of 1/10000 a post may containa message of the importance and urgency comparable to, say, "Snowden isescaping with a jet of a certain Latin-American president", I am prettysure that the cooling system of their computers would very soon needsome unscheduled maintenance work

P.S. In another group someone pointed out that the base of my idea isnot new at all. He quoted Philip Zimmermann:

"What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should usepostcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacyby using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps theauthorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately,we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most oftheir mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting theirprivacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, itwould be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all theiremail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting theiremail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity."